Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday July 20, 2009 @11:49PM
from the jack-thompson-jumps-for-joy dept.

barnyjr writes "A teenager could face federal charges after investigators say he made online threats to kill Americans on a plane from Indianapolis to Chicago. According to investigators, a monitor of the online interactive game World of Warcraft saw the alleged threats in an on-line chat and called Johnson County authorities. She told investigators the chatter didn't seem like a game."
I'm not sure who's crazier, this guy or the guy who just became the first World of Warcraft player to rack up 10,000 achievement points.

There was some talk in the news a year or so back about how security services were afraid of terrorists using online chat in games and such to organise.

Who wants a bet the "monitor" was actually another NSA (or similar) program data mining chat logs rather than just someone seeing it on the off chance?

I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but if the actions of security services in various countries across the world have taught us anything this last 5 or so years, it's that the measures they'll go to are suprising - from the Russian FSB murdering Litvinenko in London, to the NSA warantless wiretaps program, to the shooting of Menezes on the tube in London and the subsequent "dissapearance" of the CCTV tapes, to the use of torture by the CIA, and now it appears almost certainly MI5 too.

All transactions, including communication between players, is logged. What happened here is that other players reported this person making the threats. All reports made to WOW game managers have to be reviewed. As such they found the offending text and they are obligated by their own TOS to report it.

Look at it this way, teenager makes threats to kill his parents because they won't let him play. Blizzard has it logged but does not report it. Teenager tries to or does kill parents, who do you think is g

It wouldn't really matter is there was an NSA type watching the game and chat logs. You have no idea if the person next to you is a cop on duty or off or some government spy or some researcher trolling for information on behavioral patterns. As long as they are not cheating to get access, it doesn't matter any more then it does that you might be part of the game.

I really wish law enforcement, school officials, and the courts handled the fine gradiations between "stupid stuff kids say," "stupid stuff people, who should know better but apparently don't, say" and "real threats" better than they do. I remember a friend of mine getting suspended in elementary school for saying "I wish you would die" to someone who had been bullying them. Obviously the teary eyed little girl posed a real and imminent threat to the other kid who had at least 30 lbs on her. Then there was the guy in my freshman (high school) english class who was expelled and arrested for some poorly thought out sarcasm. The teacher had sent him to the in-school-suspension trailer for arguing with her about her grading policies. He was still pissed and was insulting her loudly as he left when she said something to the effect of "I feel like I've got the next unibomber right here. I hate watching little psychos like you go through here just knowing what you'll probably become." In response to this ridiculous thing for a teacher to say to a 14 year old student, he said "Oh right, like I'm going to put bomb in your mailbox or something. Are you f-ing nuts?"

Despite the fact that she had provoked him, that everyone in the class had attested to this and stated it was clear he was being sarcastic, he was still arrested for making threats and expelled from the county school district. I really wish our institutions were better at reacting appropriately to stuff like that. Maybe if they could tell real threats from stupid remarks we would be a lot safer from both the mentally unbalanced seeking to do us harm and our government's hamfisted attempts to look like it's doing something.

That's the word of the times. Even though with these policies we still had V-Tech, and other school shootings. It's all security theater to make the ignorant, distracted parents feel like their kids are safe. They'd rather hear terms like "zero-tolerance" than "after investigation that sarcastic remark made to your child was just that, sarcastic and hollow with no intention of following through with the threat."

Ah yes, "zero tolerance," the handy crutch for teachers and administrators who are either too stupid to be trusted with making decisions on their own or who are too lazy to make said decisions. Thank you lazy and stupid people for keeping our police officers and courts busy dealing with stupid shit like this when they could be dealing with actual crimes.

The teachers and school administration are actually bullies themselves, and are run by bullies. That's why they never seriously stop bullying (their own progeny!) and always crack down HARD on the bullied.

Did you read the whole article? He wasn't just joking around or taken out of context. He WANTED the FBI to come to test some theory of "if you make threats online against a plane, the police would show up at your doorstep.". Before he even admitted to doing it, he lied and said his computer was hacked. This kid isn't right in the head if he thinks making threats against innocent people, regardless if it's legitimate or not, is acceptable.

What they say it is about is always, always irrelevant. With certain people in minor positions of power, anything that amounts to the word 'no' is a high crime and they will use every means at their disposal to crush you. Fortunately, such people often have less power than they believe they do. The world is, sadly, full of such small people.

I agreed with you (but thought it was all very obvious) up to this point:

I remember a friend of mine getting suspended in elementary school for saying "I wish you would die" to someone who had been bullying them.

Actually, I think it IS a horrible and dangerous attitude when a kid says something like that. It may not be much of a threat then, but it shows that the child is being allowed to mature without the necessary coping skills for teenage and adult relationships, which she'll one day have to deal with.

I agreed with you (but thought it was all very obvious) up to this point:

I remember a friend of mine getting suspended in elementary school for saying "I wish you would die" to someone who had been bullying them.

Actually, I think it IS a horrible and dangerous attitude when a kid says something like that. It may not be much of a threat then, but it shows that the child is being allowed to mature without the necessary coping skills for teenage and adult relationships, which she'll one day have to dea

But when the teacher told me that what I said was inappropriate, and I asked my parents about it later, I - at least as far as I could at that time - understood what was up and I didn't do it again. That's all that needed to happen...Kids really can be quite understanding if you give actual explanations beyond "BECAUSE WE SAID SO".

Yep, that's pretty much my view as well. The only difference is that, I've seen parents happily teach kids that it's OK to be hateful or to have destructive coping mechanisms, b

"Actually, I think it IS a horrible and dangerous attitude when a kid says something like that. "

Did you notice the part about the kid being a teary-eyed little girl who had been the victim of a bully? What about the bully's attitude? The really screwed up person is the bully, and the parent who, through abuse or neglect allowed their kid to become a sadistic little bastard that would enjoy torturing smaller and weaker people.

". . . kids with this sort of behaviour should be detected, taken aside, and tau

I am in complete agreement. All the running from bullies and crying and pleading and reporting them to the teacher didn't stop the bullies from harassing me when I was a kid in school. All the counseling didn't stop them.

Hitting one upside the head with a stack of books and telling the rest to (paraphrased) "bring it on, there's more where that came from" did. When they realized that their lame threats weren't scaring me anymore, and that I was willing to get hit to hit them back, they stopped. I never got

What's really sad is that he'll be facing federal felony charges if he is tried and convicted. Felony charges. For words. This country is out of hand. This is approaching thought crime, and I don't think I'm the only one that finds this disturbing. Just scare the kid and make him do a few hundred hours of community service. This isn't something that anybody needs to go to federal pound me in the ass prison at the sweet age of 18 over. When did all of our laws suddenly become felonies? Felonies really destro

"Despite the fact that she had provoked him, that everyone in the class had attested to this and stated it was clear he was being sarcastic, he was still arrested for making threats and expelled from the county school district."

If this is true, I am absolutely appalled. I would like to think that there would be some sort of legal recourse for your friend -- did he try contacting the ACLU or any similar organizations? His civil liberties were unquestionably violated and he absolutely deserves restitution f

I really wish law enforcement, school officials, and the courts handled the fine gradiations between "stupid stuff kids say," "stupid stuff people, who should know better but apparently don't, say" and "real threats" better than they do.

The whole idea of the "Crime of Conspiracy" irks me simply because it reminds me of people like Cardinal Richelieu [wikipedia.org] whose mantra was:

"Never write a letter and never destroy one.""If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something

Conspiracy has been defined in the US as an agreement of two or more people to commit a crime, or to accomplish a legal end through illegal actions....

Conspiracy law usually does not require proof of specific intent by the defendants to injure any specific person to establish an illegal agreement. Instead, usually the law only requires the conspirators have agreed to engage in a certain illegal act. This is sometimes described as a "general intent" to violate the law.

Conspiracy requires an agreement between people to commit a crime, so at the very least there must be (a) two people, and (b) evidence that they agreed to commit a crime. Some state laws further require an overt act to be committed in furtherance of the proposed crime.

Sorry, got to pick you up on this. The 'fire in a crowded theatre' thing is bullshit for three reasons:

1. It was from a ruling against people distributing anti-draft literature in the first world war. A blatant violation of free speech

2. It was overturned just a few years later

3. It doesn't make sense anyway. Honestly, try yelling fire in a crowded theatre, I garuntee the worst that will happen is people chuck bits of their refreshments at you. It isn't the responsibility of a person not to yell 'fire', its

I think the most amazing part of the story is this:"According to the report, the teen told investigators he'd heard if you make threats online against a plane, the police would show up at your doorstep. The teen told investigators he was only testing that theory."

He should be thankful to the Feds that they did not send in a SWAT team to smash open the door a.k.a Transformers, and drown the kid in a swimming pool.When will people realize that online equals real world ?

True.But then adults are not entirely sure when kids talk shit or when they talk sense.Take for instance Columbine and subsequent school shootings.All of them perpetrated by kids who had talked about it before and been ignored.Why take a chance?Some fool of a Took might take it upon himself to talk superior shit in Warcraft because his raid was resoundly defeated by another bunch of fools playing from another country/town/state/region. Very soon the original fool takes this quarrel into real world parallels

It's not government's job to stop trash-talking 13 year olds. If it ever does become government's job, then that's a solid indication that the government in question has achieved obsolescence and should be promptly scrapped.

"According to the report, the teen told investigators he'd heard if you make threats online against a plane, the police would show up at your doorstep. The teen told investigators he was only testing that theory."

It makes you wonder...did he perhaps expect Ed McMahon and the Publisher's Clearing House folks to come to the door? (That'd be a trick, and be the first sign of the so-called 'Zombie Apocalypse', but that's another issue).

Actually, I'd guess he expected the same I'd expect: That it's a bunch of baloney and no sane person would believe a 14 year old is plotting the end of the civilized world.

Want to be a terrorist and bring the police forces to the threshold of their ability to uphold order?

1. Sign up a few hundred online accounts under false name.2. Start chatting about how you'll blow up shit.3. Watch SWAT teams all over the continent bust doors of your false addresses, 24/74. Commit the crime you want to commit once they'v

Not at all a ridiculous strategy. Think of it as a Denial-Of-Counterterrorism attack; throw up some much 'chatter' and false leads at the time you want to attack. I don't know if anyone has tried it yet, but it wouldn't surprise me.

We need sober, thoughtful investigators unraveling terror networks. Not trigger happy knuckleheads jumping on any and every chance to pretend they are Jack fucking Bauer.

"Actually, I'd guess he expected the same I'd expect: That it's a bunch of baloney and no sane person would believe a 14 year old is plotting the end of the civilized world."

What kind of fantasy world do you live in? Are you one of those pot smokers? Just look around the world at all the kid "soldiers", terrorists, freedom fighters etc, who even at age 13-14 do some strategic level planning. I know, because I've had to deal with some of those kids IN THE REAL WORLD, in Kongo and Liberia for example. Plenty

We are talking about a 14 year old playing WoW. Ok? What's the chance of this being a 14 year old mastermind that cleverly decided WoW is the perfect guise to pose as someone with no life, no friends and too much time? And what's the chance that it IS a 14 year old teenager with no life, no friends and too much time?

If this was Afghanistan, Liberia or Kongo, I might consider your point. This isn't. It's the lazy, overfed, gimmegimmegimme Western World.

First of all, when you see chat in WoW, you have no idea how old the player is. 10? 15? 25? 55? And remember, this wasn't some "I be ubrz I'm going to kill all you elves" chatter, this was a specific threat against a specific airline flight. If this was mailed in to a newspaper as a threat, you can be damned sure the cops would investigate it, so why should online posts be held to a lower standard?

Because it takes actual effort to write and then post a letter to a major newspaper. Typing stuff in WoW while idling in some zone somewhere takes about 0 effort and relieves some of the boredom of just idling around in a zone in WoW.

Emailing a letter to a newspaper is EXACTLY the same effort as typing in WoW. And who cares how much effort it is? If someone makes a specific threat against a specific airplane and the plane goes down, do YOU want to be the one who explains why you just were too lazy to check it out?

If you ignore a written threat and a plane goes down, do YOU want to be the one who explains the deaths to the families?

And without investigating, remind me how you knew the age of the person making the threat?

By the way, we're not talking about an 8 year old kid pressing 911 to see the shiny fire truck show up, the guy was 18. Old enough to work, old enough to join the army and kill people, certainly old enough to know better.

As a guy with 4090 achievement points after 9 months of game play, I'm impressed, but I think he's been doing it a long time, too.*(My point total already puts me in the top 400 on my server, which makes me feel good, but there are many thousands in the US and Europe that rate higher, when all the battlegroups are taken together.)

I'm somewhat more impressed with the fact that he has 32 Feats of Strength. I have... 3. But then again, FoS are special achievements that don't count towards the normal point tota

You know, its not as hard or as time consuming as you would think. Granted, he has to be a good, and that does take a certain amount of time and dedication, but when you are a good WoW player, you actually have to play *less* to do more. Almost more importantly than that are the people who you play with. Almost all of those achievements are not his achievements alone, but also a testament to the people he played with who achieved the same things: his raid, his arena team, and his friends in general.

How large a gathering of terrorist gnomes does it take to make continuous raids on Tinkertown more cost effective in disrupting their plotting than actually raiding their homes?

Not to say the FBI would be doing the raiding; they would only need to put one or two personnel in charge of organizing and Horde subsidization, such that the usual employment costs would be reduced by players that would take the enjoyment of smashing a gnome in the face with an orc battle axe. After all, if the terrorists advanced t

Knowing that their government is monitoring motherfucking world of warcraft chat for terrorist activity. I mean, I personally play on Defias Brotherhood (EU) and I'm fairly sure the July 7th bombers didn't plan their attacks in any major alliance cities. Can't speak for the horde of course, its an RPPVP server.

Why do anti-terrorist agencies keep throwing up lonely teenagers with fantasies about blowing things up that they will never carry out? The most obvious explanation is that they are unable to really d

The government is NOT monitoring WoW. This was something that was picked up by a GM. He probably was reported by somebody for saying this in the trade channel, in fact -- GMs don't often actually actively monitor chat, but when someone reports something, they do have the ability to check out a log of recent chatter in the channel.

First, from a European point of view, the "I'll sue your ass for not telling me the sky is blue" way of handling responsibility has caused any identity (government, business, neighbor, colleague, celebrity) that cannot hide in anonymity to be overly cautious. Any acceptable risk of danger is offset by the enormous danger of due compensation if something does go wrong.
Secondly, the government is, due to their required independence, by definition an onlooker with regard to the communities they have to watch/control. Could we easily tell from carefully watching a box of thousands of bouncing rubber balls which ones are behaving differently from the others when it all looks like a blur? Surely, each individual ball would notice discrepancies upon encountering such an outlier, but this cannot be expected from an outsider.
Thirdly, and this combines the first two, the best the onlooker can do to exclude any false negatives in its selection procedure, is to make sure any voluntary irregular behavior is absent, so that the irregular ones are more easily distinguished. For that same reason any, maybe in itself harmless, strange behavior at airports is dealt with as if it were the real thing to discourage such behavior in the future. The assumption is, of course, that the odd balls are unable to act as normal as the regular ones.

A couple of years ago, some alerts were ignored by the security services and 9/11 happened. Oh, some might argue that they had orders to do so but in security you RARELY respond with exactly the right response. Either you have 2 cops, 4 street coaches and a motor ambulance driver attending a scraped knee (just yesterday) or you are screaming in your radio for back up while people are dying because you only got one pair of hands.

In security be it police, firemen, ambulance there really is only ONE right res

Seriously? You're going to compare the level of crazy of someone (allegedly) making a (credible) threat on someone else's life -- perhaps many people's -- and that of someone who spends "too much" time playing a video game? Seriously?

Seriously? You're going to compare the level of crazy of someone (allegedly) making a (credible) threat on someone else's life -- perhaps many people's -- and that of someone who spends "too much" time playing a video game? Seriously?

Well it is probably fair to compare someone who is stupid enough to make threats in a game where ALL the chat is logged to someone who just plays too much. I guess someone forgot to point out that what happens in Dalaran stays in Dalaran.

We'll see what the Feds decide to do with the wanker. If he mentioned a particular spell he had in mind for the plane, it could make for an interesting trial. During the Vietnam war I must have had pizza for dinner half a dozen times because the dorm food service was closed for bomb threats. Nobody was ever prosecuted back then.

What? Loose lips? Some jackass made stupidly specific threats against a major flight in the US.

How the fuck should they have responded? Ignore it on the likely chance its some jackass kid, or you know, actually follow up and do their fucking jobs.

I can just imagine the stink you would have posted in the alternate universe of slashdot where the kid is credible and the authorities do ignore it. "Oh how they've failed us. Look, all show, no substance. We need competent security people!"

And why is it the government's responsibility to make a private trip in a privately owned airplane safe for you, pay for all that security with my tax dollars, and use intrusive government means as part of security?

Make airline security exclusively an airline responsibility: no tax dollars and no governmental intrusions anymore. And I bet if companies had to pay the full consequences of terrorism, they'd find ways to make sure it didn't happen.

I like your idea, problem is corps don't have the right to secure their planes the way they'd like to, only the government can make you a meat puppet. So I'm against the idea of making someone responsible for something that they don't have the rights to secure themselves against. And if we give them the rights to do that... well... perhaps cyberpunk isn't too far off and Shadowrun [wikipedia.org] will become reality... that'd rock.

I believe that would be the FDA and the AMA as, to the best of my knowledge, they have yet to authorize a drug or technique that makes knocking someone out 100% safe. Reactions to anesthetics (the way doctors knock people out for surgery) are one of the most well known ways that people die during, even mundane, surgery. Even when the surgery works, there is an anesthesiologist there the whole time monitoring the patient's condition. This is the real world, not fantasy. Just because the rest of the A-Team gave BA a shot every time they needed to take a flight doesn't mean it's a realistic technique that could be done to every airplane passenger.

While more often than not I would tend to agree with your point of view, it should be considered just how far this attitude can be carried.

Would this idea of government non-interference extend to a scenario where someone heard a scream from a neighboring apartment and called a police on an off-chance that there might be a murder in progress and not a TV show? Would it go so far as to extend to a situation in a bar where someone is screaming in your face that they're gonna kick your ass all the way down to A

Threats to people should be protected by "real" police with the authority to use serious force. If you pose a real threat to the physical safety of other people (life, limb, etc) it's justifiable to use deadly force to prevent that threat in the most extreme cases.

Threats to property should be protected by the people who benefit financially from that property, and the force allowed should be limited to non-lethal means, and non-permanent. Catch 'em and turn 'em over to

The corporations would just do a cost benefit analysis and figure out how much it really costs if a plane is taken over by fanatical terrorists and then provide the minimum amount of security necessary to financially mitigate that risk.

There still is a public concern over this actually - for instance what if a guy wanted to fly a plane into a populated area or building?

Why libertarianism doesn't work:The downside cost of an action (or failure to act) can be greater to society than the individual actor is capable of reimbursing, while the upside benefit of so acting (or failing to so act) can be substantial.

Remember the financial crisis after 911? From an airlines cost/benefit perspective it's better to scrimp on security, because they personally are unlikely to recoup the cost of security expenditures. However, if even a single airline has sufficiently lax security to attract a terrorist strike, the cost to society as a whole is astronomical. Meanwhile, that one airline folds as soon as it is sued, and your 401(k) suffers.

The first argument is a very interesting point. Well said. I'm going to reflect on that at length when I have some free time.

As for your example, it's ridiculous to argue that a political philosophy is somehow fundamentally broken because s specific implementation might not guarantee a utopian outcome. e.g. Are you willing to throw out The U.S. Constitution and the phlosophical ideas of democracy and republic just because the criminals who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks were able to do so within our system

The example is a specific rebuttal to the GP's assertion that we should let airlines handle their own security. I'm not dismissing libertarianism only on the one example, I'm dismissing it based on the general principle I laid out. I could offer dozens of examples to support this, for instance, particualrly timely are Liehman/AIG, Bernie Madoff, and countrywide financial.

Socialized risk and privitized reward is the worst of all worlds. And since some risk is always going to be socialized, since the indiv

But did they make specific and credible threats about killing Obama? Just saying "I'm going to kill Obama, he deserves to die" is nothing. There are thousands of people everywhere who say that, but there are very few who should be taken seriously.For example if they threatened to kill Obama at a certain time and place, and Obama was indeed going to be at that place, and they were also likely to be in that place too, I'm sure they'd get investigated and possibly arrested too.

Ignore it? They can't. Not because something might happen. The chance is insignificant that any banter on any MMO is actually terrorists plotting the end of the world. But the media will chew them apart if they don't react. How could they ignore it! They knew it! That GM told the authorities and they just didn't do anything about it! The horrorz, incompetent gubernant!

Yes, it's insane, but this was actually the sane thing to do. Or, let's say, the most sensible. What are the possible outcomes? That it's som

Your post doesn't make sense. Did you even *browse* TFA? Kid's 18 years old, first of all, that's not a kid. That's an adult, it's reported as a kid because it's more SHOCKING! if the police are wasting time over a kid than a legal adult. SPIN!Don't forget there's been several cases recently where postings were made on the internet shortly before somebody like this kid DID go on a killing spree. I'm sure you remember that right? There is precedent for people boasting about serious crimes that will result in loss of life in their chosen favorite online hang-out before the fact. The kid also stated that he had heard making a threat like that would get the cops at your door and wanted to test it, so I'm going to guess he said a bit more than "I'M GONNA BLOW UP A PLANE LOLZ".

I completely fail to see how you could think that if he was a terrorist that the response was idiotic. What would YOU have done? Sent somebody to observe him, when the threat was he would be blowing up a plane the NEXT MORNING? I'm sorry? Fact of the matter is, he singled out a specific plane and a specific time, and that crosses the threshold from throw-away threat in to actual threat. This is no different than making a posting somewhere that in the morning you're going to shoot up your school (hai2u 4chan), or walking through a mall and being overheard telling somebody that you're going to blow up the library at XYZ address first thing Monday morning.

Stop acting like this kid's been mistreated. He deserves what he gets for acting a fool. He's not a kid, he's a god damned adult, he should know better than to do something like this.

"Don't forget there's been several cases recently where postings were made on the internet shortly before somebody like this kid DID go on a killing spree. I'm sure you remember that right? There is precedent for people boasting about serious crimes that will result in loss of life in their chosen favorite online hang-out before the fact."

There isn't a precedent for terrorist attacks on aircraft being announced on World of Warcraft, or in fact anywhere, before they happen. Large well funded terrorist groups

Sure, it's pretty clear NOW that there was no actual threat. Doesn't change the fact that there WAS a specific threat made. If we were to use your logic, any time there's a bomb threat called in to a school it should just be ignored, right? The likelihood of it being real is pretty low. And heck, let's not even investigate it at all, KIDS WILL BE KIDS amirite?

Bombs can be snuck on to planes, and without investigating the matter at all there's no way of telling if this was just someone running their mout

lol yeah okay then. If there's a specific threat against a specific plane and airport security is aware of it, no one is going to be getting a bomb on that plane. No additional costs are incurred because security will be doing their job anyway, perhaps just being told to be more alert for that day and be alert for a specific person. Have you ever actually been to an airport in recent years?

You've got a poor understanding of costs involved in these things if you think a simpl

A specific threat like this should always be investigated. I'm sure you would feel differently if you had friends or family aboard that flight.

If every specific threat was investigated, it would only take a well financed terrorist organization to swamp all the investigators with false positives by paying people over in 3rd world internet cafe $0.01 per threat.